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Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#231

Post by spdustin »

cyberferret wrote: post #138

I've been using Clarion since back in the late 1980's (when it ran on DOS). Still using it to this day, and it earns me the majority of my revenues in my company. Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarion_(programming_language) The language itself is an amalgamation of COBOL, Pascal and C. But for me, the biggest advantage was the development environment. It was the first IDE that I came across back then that…

Wow, Clarion. In my younger days, I helped write a Clarion app to help homeowners insurance agencies electronically rate new policies after Florida re-wrote it's insurance underwriting rules to force everyone to follow the same formulas. Was pretty popular, though my contributions were fairly minor.

I wonder how many Bernoulli cartridges are still kicking around with that old code...

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#232

Post by bsharitt »

ukoms wrote: post #86
drelihan wrote: post #8

Perl and C here mostly. C89, that is. Both are widely used languages, just not in the startup space. a lot of our stuff is built on those languages so it wouldn't make sense to rewrite a lot of the stuff at this point unless there was a business case for it.

So I'm not alone :) Perl and C everyday ;)

I'm mostly a sysadmin so Perl is a big part of my life whether I like it or not, but not much C.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#234

Post by bsharitt »

St_Alfonzo wrote: post #29

I use Common Lisp since 2 years now. Here in germany, most of the students I talked to classify CL as an unfashionable language.. I really like the simplicity of the syntax and the stability of the language standard/specification. There will be no "Today we released v2, all your v1 code will be invalid"

I'm curious since you mention students, so you may be one as well, but is Common Lisp just a hobby language for you, or do you have a productive professional use?

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#235

Post by m_mueller »

tfgg wrote: post #125
goerz wrote: post #119

I've been using Fortran 90/95 extensively over the last few years, for numerical simulation of quantum systems. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Fortran (which is partly due to Fortran 77, with its punchcard format and spaghetti code). Fortran 90 is basically a different language, and is actually reasonably modern. I see it as significantly more suitable for numerical programming than C/C++. Fortran is c…

I also worked on a quantum (DFT) code in Fortran 95. I agree on your points, once you get used to it, it's basically isomorphic to C but with better numerical support. Compared to C++ it's verbose but understandable and with little magic, which is an advantage when working on a team, similar to Java. Main disadvantages I found were rubbish string and IO handling, no standard library of algorithms/data structures (lis…

> Most of those are effectively fixed as the high-level controlling code is moved to Python and the F95 code is libraryized.

That's exactly how I think high performance numerical code should be structured like. Unfortunately this thinking hasn't quite arrived in the Fortran world yet where most don't really think about a two-language-approach.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#236

Post by cwp »

Rockslide wrote: post #81

Smalltalk! I got in touch with it in university and I love it. I'm convinced it is the best OO language there is, and generally one of the best general purpose languages (and environments!) ever invented. I even had the luck to be able to use it on my last job (VisualWorks), but unfortunately I no longer have that job :(

Here here!

I had several Smalltalk jobs (VisualWorks, Squeak), before going back into more mainstream stuff. Still use it for personal projects, though.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#237

Post by arihant »

I still use Awk.

I picked up Awk for some random 15-123 assignment in sophomore year. I still use it for automating/shell scripting anything that I need to. I could use Python or something hip. But I haven't quite grown out of my fondness for Awk.

I'd add Lisp to the list, but you can't call it unfashionable, unless you also call Beetles unfashionable.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#238

Post by Hixie »

deusu wrote: post #34

Pascal - still use it today. I started with Turbo Pascal 3.0, went through several versions of Borland Pascal (DOS and Windows), several versions of Delphi, and am now using FreePascal. I do most of my work on Linux nowadays. Pascal still gets everything done and after 20+ years I am really fluent in it. Did a little bit of Javascript with Node.js, also looked at Golang. While I did like some aspects of them, there w…

The HTML spec's preprocessor is written in FreePascal: https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#239

Post by epmatsw »

cordite wrote: post #110
ratbeard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Epic healthcare in Madison, that was my first job out of college and continues to grow at an insane rate. MUMPS was a kinda cool language - I liked it a lot better than VB6 which the GUI was written in. Every line had to start with a command like 'set' or 'do', which was abbreviated as 's' or 'd' which looked pretty gnarly. The `for` loop syntax there was a difference between 1 or 2 spaces which after the 'f(or)'…

I'm there right now. I think the only reasonable alternative would be something like erlang at this time. I see M as still used because it is without fail very predictable in resource usage and behavior, and with certain patterns, not prone to fail or crash. It also can be updated in runtime without having users have to restart or reconnect for most cases. I suggest Erlang, because it has the similar desired behavior…

I left there a while back, and I recently tried installing GT.M for old times sake. It's not really any fun without Chronicles unfortunately

Re: Ask HN: Do you use an old or 'unfashionable' programming language?

#240

Post by brobinson »

Blackthorn wrote: post #74
Gaessaki wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a young developer, do you know where and how I could go about getting into the COBOL industry? All the job listings seem to require a decade's worth of experience and lists expertise requirements in technologies that are proprietary and only available on a mainframe. COBOL on its own is not very hard to pick up, but I'm lost as to how to learn about the ancillary technologies. I'm not sure it's so much that nobody…

Why would you want to? There's a lot of smoke and noise made about how companies are desperate for COBOL developers because the old ones are retiring or dying blah blah blah, but I've never seen actual good salaries to back it up. And to add insult to injury, you're unlikely to be able to take the skills you've learned to your next job when you inevitably change jobs.

What kind of salaries have you seen?

I've read that most of the companies still using COBOL are banks, insurance companies, etc. They seem like the companies, if any, that could provide really compelling salaries for something with allegedly high demand and increasingly small supply.

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